


Lucky Penny

by Jaetion



Series: Love That Dirty Water [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Awkwardness, Conversations, Friendship, Gen, Male Friendship, Not Beta Read, Pre-Canon, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 04:51:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17594948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaetion/pseuds/Jaetion
Summary: It was luck that brought Cutler and Danse together. Cutler’s old gang split up - Jim went west, Big Buck died, Mel got pregnant and maybe died, he didn’t know. Once she left Rivet City, there really wasn’t a way to keep in touch. Good fighters were a bottlecap a dozen in the capital - shitty ones didn’t last long - but someone as good with a gun as his fists was pretty hard to find.





	Lucky Penny

**Author's Note:**

> I'm just really interested in Danse's life before the game.

2276, somewhere around Washington DC

\---

It was luck that brought Cutler and Danse together. Cutler’s old gang split up - Jim went west, Big Buck died, Mel got pregnant and maybe died, he didn’t know. Once she left Rivet City, there really wasn’t a way to keep in touch. Good fighters were a bottlecap a dozen in the capital - shitty ones didn’t last long - but someone as good with a gun as his fists was pretty hard to find. And he hadn’t tried to shiv Cutler as soon as he’d turned his back. Or cheat him out of his share of profits. All those things added up to a rare ass partner. And to top it all off, Danse seemed content to follow Cutler - Instructions and around the Capital.

Wasn’t bad having a fucking giant at his side when he made deals. All Danse had to do was stand there and suddenly creditors stopped calling, gang members stopped heckling, and merchants didn’t even bother attempt to fleece them. And if his huge ass presence didn’t do it, Danse would lean down and say in his low, rumbling voice what he personally recommended the person should do - And nine out of ten times his advice was followed. 

Incredible luck. Way more than Cutler had ever had before. “Maybe my good karma’s paying off at last,” he said lazily to Danse as they sat on the roof of a collapsed building. And then before Danse could ask him to clarify and Cutler would have to say outloud how much he appreciated the guy, he continued, “Pretty damn lucky that we found this place. Offices are better than houses. Better tech and more caps. Pre-war assholes drank so much Nuka-Cola I can’t believe there’s anything left.”

“Interesting texts, too,” Danse added and Cutler heard him rifle through the papers they’d dug out of a cabinet. 

“Only thing a man needs to know how to read is his name. And maybe ‘Washington’ so he doesn’t get too fucking lost. Also maybe ‘fuck you.’”

“That doesn’t sound particularly helpful.”

“Literacy is overrated. Everyone knew how to read back then and it didn’t help them from getting blown to bits.”

Danse had no response to that piece of logic, but Cutler didn’t mind the silence. He punched his bag into something of a pillow shape and lay back, closed his eyes. The afternoon sun was a warm blanket and now that he had a partner, he could actually relax, let someone else keep an eye on things. Maybe even take a nap.

But after a bit of musing, Danse said, “Houses, however, have more practical stockpiles: food, clothes, ammo…”

“Look, if you want to dig through someone’s photo albums and teddy bears, be my guest.” Another good thing about Danse: he didn’t mock anything Cutler confided, so Cutler could continue, admitting something he’d never told anyone in his old gang, “I don’t like houses. It’s too personal somehow. Feels like stealing.”

“They are sort of like memorials,” Danse agreed. 

“Or straight-up graves.”

“Do corpses bother you? Skeletons?”

No. Yes. “I don’t know. I guess so - Who wants to see dead people all over the damn place? Fucking sickos, that’s who. But I meant like…” he trailed off. What had he meant? There really wasn’t any solid reason why scavenging in offices wasn’t looting, too. 

“Once they’re dead, people are less trouble,” Danse said and Cutler tilted his head backwards to look at his partner. Dark eyes under dark brows looked back at him. In the weeks since they’d paired up, he’d never heard Danse crack a joke and he barely laughed at Cutler’s. No, Danse had meant that seriously. Maybe he was a sociopath in it for a long-con, getting close to Cutler so he could… what? Steal the braumin jerky in his pocket? 

Danse was a damn good fighter, he thought again. Maybe too good. Maybe there was a reason he could one-shot bloatflies out of the sky and walk over crippled ghouls and shoot them point blank. Maybe there was a reason that Danse didn’t talk about his past in any detail.

“That sounded real fucking creepy, Danse.”

He had the decency to get flustered. “I meant that only living people - anything that’s living - are dangerous. Other than maybe giving you an infection, the dead aren’t real risks.” He rubbed one of his hands through his hair and muttered, “It came out more morbid than I intended.”

And that damn vocabulary. Maybe it was worth it to start reading. “Ok, that’s a little less psycho,” he grunted.

“What you said about houses…”

“Yeah? What are you going to tell me now? I really can’t handle a fucking murderer or whatever you are. Don’t make me regret thinking that you’re my good luck charm.”

“Ah.” Danse shuffled his papers a bit for a few seconds. “Well. I was going to say... Maybe it feels like stealing because the things were owned by people. Sometimes people whose skeletons are still there. Offices, business, corporations are entities, but they aren’t people. Faceless. Identity-less.”

“Victimless crimes.”

“You can justify a lot in the name of survival,” Danse noted, and Cutler made a grumbling noise. “But yes, I have a hard time thinking of a long-gone corporation as a victim. Or do you think think that makes me psycho?”

Cutler climbed to his feet, stretched, sauntered over to where Danse still sat and flopped down beside him. He looked over at the other man, who was frowning again because he did it a lot, judging everything and finding it wanting. “Yeah it’s sort of an intrusion, right? Everything quiet, and then we come in and mess things up that have been lying there for two hundred years. It’s more than just theirs… It’s sort of like it is them, you know? The house, all the stuff in it - It’s everything that that person was. I don’t need aluminum that badly.”

“So we’ll stay in the commercial and industrial sectors,” Danse said firmly. There, decided. And Cutler knew him well enough that he heard the finality in the decision. Danse would stick to his word. He stood up and offered his hand to Cutler.

“Yeah. Good. Outstanding.” Cutler accepted Danse’s hand, and curled his fingers around Danse’s - warm, calloused - and got a decent grip before he pulled him to his feet. “I’m ready to get moving. We can dick around after it gets dark.”

They grabbed their bags and stuffed everything away. After they got back down to the ground, Cutler pulled out their shitty map to figure out where they should go. Beside him he heard the click and lock of Danse’s rifle as the guy reloaded it. They’d gotten into a routine: Cutler doing recon while Danse did the patrol. But when Danse cleared his throat, Cutler glanced up to find him still standing there.

“Did you mean what you said?” Danse asked. “Before? About me?”

“Huh?” His attention was still on the map - was it better to stay along 66 or maybe branch off somewhere? - and it took him a moment to figure out what Danse was talking about. When he called the guy a psycho? “Nah. It was a joke.”

“Ah.”

“So you feel like doing a sweep or what? Come on, we can do it together. I still got some .44s for the revolver.”

They stuck to 66, not for any particular reason. Got some more loot in what was some sort of grocery store, and only had to kill radroaches. Pretty damn lucky.


End file.
